


No Quarter

by deadlybride



Series: Physical Graffiti [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, M/M, Mindfuck, Psychological Torture, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-04 23:36:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadlybride/pseuds/deadlybride
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's got to be okay. Dean came for him like he always swore he would, he came and he looked deep past the devil into the very heart of Sam. He was the righteous man, just like the prophecies promised, and he took all of the power of his immense capacity for belief and channeled it right into his little brother and let Sam pull two archangels into a cage. That Sam had to fall in, too, well—it seemed like a small price to pay.</p><p>"Not so small, Sam," Lucifer says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Quarter

**Author's Note:**

> “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”

 

For the first hundred years Sam burns. It's not what he expected. He knows time is passing, but even so it always feels like the same handful of identical moments. Two versions of his existence slide against each other, separated by the thinnest of membranes, and so he knows that weeks have passed at the same time that he knows it's only been two or three minutes, but—three minutes is enough. The fire is burning away his clothes, licking over every inch of skin. He can smell cooking meat, the acrid stench of burnt hair hitting him right in the back of the throat. There's a moment when everything goes numb and his brain, scattered, throws up what he knows about burns: how after the flames sink down past enough layers of skin they don't even hurt anymore because the nerves have been scorched clean out. The only thing left is to carve out the dead spots. Just when everything goes cold, though, when he thinks he's done and will just be charred down to clean, quiet bone—that's when he opens his eyes and the flames are just barely starting to spread, his clothes and skin and hair restored, and he opens his mouth but there's no air left to scream.

When his brain functions, he thinks of Sisyphus, of Prometheus, of their endless condemned days. He wonders how much truth there is to the stories. _Enough_ , he thinks, and then he's burning.

It stops when, between one excruciating moment and the next, he hears a voice shout out an _enough_ of its own in tones of iron and brass. He opens his eyes. The fires are gone and he's in a blackened, barren little room, crouched up against the wall. Before him stand two men. For a second he sees—light, two fractal patterns spiraling out in unthinkable infinities away from each other, but then he shakes his head and sees, again, two men. They're mostly unremarkable. The one on the left is standing with his fists clenched at his sides, all in dark denim and dark t-shirt and short-cropped dark hair, and when Sam blinks his face resolves down to that younger version of his dad he met only once, what feels like an eternity ago. Michael. And if the one on the left is Michael, then the one on the right, smiling and blond in a plain white shirt and spreading out empty, lax fingers, that must be—it must be—

"Enough, Lucifer," Michael says, again, and Lucifer shrugs.

"I thought you wanted the big showdown." He's grinning at Michael, rolling up the sleeves on his shirt into neat cuffs. "What, getting tired?"

"If we were in our proper vessels on the mortal plane, you would already be dead," Michael says. Sam can hear the truth of it in the flatness of his voice, see it in the way Lucifer's smile fades a little. "There is no purpose to the fight here."

"No," Lucifer says. He stares at Michael for a moment. Sam can see that his skin is healed, not the horrific porous mess he'd seen in the hotel before Lucifer discarded the first vessel. Sam wonders what that man's name had been, before. Why he'd said yes.

They hold each other's eyes for a long time. It's Michael, at last, who turns away, and when he does he looks right at Sam.

"Oh, yes," Lucifer says.

"You," Michael breathes out, and Sam snaps up tight to the wall, his back scraping up the rough stone and all his bones strained almost to breaking. "You will pay for this."

Sam's bones do break, then, and he's so blindsided by the sudden return of pain that he can't even scream. Not yet, anyway.

"Not for nothing, big brother," Lucifer says, and to Sam his voice seems suddenly very far away, "but he's actually been paying already. While we were fighting. I guess I'm not surprised you didn't notice, I'm very distracting."

Michael turns his head. "What?"

"Come on." Lucifer waves a hand and Sam's dropped to the floor, his ruined bones shuddering in his skin for a mind-shredding second before they're made whole. "If nothing else, I can multitask."

"What are you talking about?" Michael says, and for a horrid second Sam hears an echo of him and Dean, when Dean's being a smartass and Sam just can't bother with humoring him anymore.

He misses his brother so much in that second he's almost blinded, but he remembers telling Dean it'd be okay. It is, now. It's got to be okay. Dean came for him like he always swore he would, he came and he looked deep past the devil into the very heart of Sam. He was the righteous man, just like the prophecies promised, and he took all of the power of his immense capacity for belief and channeled it right into his little brother and let Sam pull two archangels into a cage. That Sam had to fall in, too, well—it seemed like a small price to pay.

"Not so small, Sam," Lucifer says. He looks up from his folded arms and Lucifer's right there, eyes calm and blue and apparently human, but Sam knows better. "You remember the fire? That was what I could do when I was distracted. What do you think is in store for you now that I can give you my full consideration?"

Sam can't look away. The force of Lucifer's attention is a weight that seeps through his skin, presses him down into the black stone. Somewhere behind Lucifer Michael says, "What are you planning to do? Nothing's permanent here."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," Lucifer says, glancing back, and the tone should have been light but Sam shudders, his fingers grasping uselessly at empty air. "You think we're wearing skin, don't you, Sam? You're seeing—yes, you're seeing Nick and John, aren't you?"

He doesn't know if he's supposed to answer, but Lucifer's just staring at him with that little smile, and he chances it. "I see two archangels in vessels they're not supposed to have."

"See?" Lucifer says. He stands up and turns to Michael, who's frowning down at Sam as though he's never seen anything like him before. "Human minds. You never thought about what they saw when they rose or fell?"

"It didn't seem important," Michael says. He folds his arms over his chest.

Lucifer shrugs. "Depends."

"On what?"

"On whether you want to hurt them or not." Michael looks unimpressed, and Lucifer sighs. "Here, I'll show you."

The barren room fades around them and Sam startles up into standing. He can't see anything, and for a second he thinks he's alone, but then an ugly red light filters into his vision and he starts to pick out details. Dark, rust-brown chains. Hooks, dangling from an invisible ceiling. Tools—some he recognizes, others he doesn't. A tilted table from which hang thick leather straps smeared with things Sam doesn't want to name. It's cold here, too, and all of his clothes have been spirited away. He's already shivering when Lucifer steps up beside him, claps a hand on his shoulder. The vessel's a few inches shorter than Sam, definitely leaner, but Sam knows how helpless he is here.

"Why don't you go ahead and lay down, Sam," Lucifer says, nodding at the table.

Sam stares at him, but there's nothing to say. He steps over puddles made dark red by the weird, sourceless light, climbs onto the table and does as he's told. _This is saving the world_ , he thinks, and Lucifer laughs out loud.

"Not quite, buddy, but don't worry. We've got all kinds of time to prove just how wrong you are."

The straps start to wind over Sam's ankles, over his wrists, across his naked crotch and bare chest and over his chin, binding his head down tight to the table and shoving his jaw closed so he can't speak.

"Lucifer." Michael's in Sam's field of vision, but he doesn't look over. "This hardly seems necessary."

"Sorry, big brother, I thought you were all set to punish the unbeliever," Lucifer says. There's the grating sound of metal over stone and then Lucifer's at Sam's side, a simple knife in his hand. "What happened to all that heavenly wrath?"

Michael's jaw clenches. "You said you were going to show me. I'm unimpressed."

"I'm not trying to impress you," Lucifer says, voice suddenly dark with venom, and he slashes the knife across Sam's chest, a big diagonal cut just under the skin that immediately starts flooding with blood. Sam yells through clenched teeth behind the restraints, but neither of the archangels glance over.

"Feel that, Sam?" Lucifer says, but he's looking at Michael. "Human minds. Full of memories. Imbuing actions and people and places and things with meaning. You can push in under the mind's membrane and grasp his soul, you can rip holes and tear it to pieces and go to town, if you want. But that's not how torture works. Don't they teach you that in Heaven?"

Michael's eyes are dark. "I have never tortured."

Lucifer lets out a little huff of laughter and turns away, looks down at Sam. "Sure," he says. He reaches up and pulls down one of the hooks from the ceiling, its chain clinking gently, and without preamble he pushes the hook in the meat of Sam's shoulder, the barb slicing neatly through the skin and settling deep. Sam's eyes flood with tears and he can't see either of their faces, but Lucifer's voice is calm. "We're in for the long haul here, Sam. Let's show Michael what we're made of, okay?"

It's easy to let go, after that. There's no sense in trying not to scream.

 

 

Time glides away. Days or possibly decades, Sam's not sure. He's had fingers broken and severed, his eyes put out, been whipped and torn and flayed open. He's been exsanguinated and boned while he watched, and after everything he's put back together, fresh and clean and ready for more. Lucifer's shirt has been stained with all sorts of things, but it always leaches back to white.

Right now Sam's laid on his stomach on his table, wrists pulled taut over his head with one of the meat hooks. His head is twisted to the right and he's breathing free but shaky against his bicep.

"You know," Lucifer starts, but then pauses to concentrate. He has a two-inch strip of Sam's skin in his pliers and he likes to peel it off evenly.

"What?" Michael says, finally. He's leaning against the wall in front of Sam, where he almost always is.

Lucifer finishes skinning the neat square on Sam's back and puts his hand in Sam's sweat-soaked hair. "Sorry, sweetie, this'll just be a minute." Sam nods, as much as he can between the table and his arm, and Lucifer pats his shoulder. "Good boy."

He moves off, drops his tools on a table off to the left. "I have to say, I'm impressed at your fortitude. I'd have thought you would've stopped me by now."

Michael tilts his head back against the wall, closes his eyes. "It wouldn't do any good, would it?"

"No," Lucifer says, laughter in his voice. "But still, for someone who's so thrilled about the roles we're meant to play, it seems a little strange that I have the highest soldier of Heaven just lounging around my workshop. So to speak."

There's a long pause. Sam can hear metal clinking together behind him, but even with his hard-won experience here he doesn't know what it is.

"This is your cage, Lucifer," Michael says. His eyes are still closed. "Were we in Heaven, this would go differently."

"So, what, I've got home-court advantage? I guess that's nice. Means we're free to get creative, right, Sam?"

Sam squeezes his eyes shut. Nods.

"I thought—" Michael starts.

"What?"

"Considering the great zeal with which your servants tormented Dean, I thought you'd have gone about Sam the same way."

Something clanks on the table behind Sam and he flinches. It makes the raw empty space on his back flare with pain.

"Wouldn't work. He's much stronger than his brother. No point in trying to get him to break, not that way."

Sam opens his eyes. Michael has folded his arms over his chest and his gaze, though heavy on Sam, is dispassionate. "Sam has already broken. He said yes. Dean only ever said no."

Sam can't see Lucifer, but he can hear the grin. "You don't get it. What breaks someone out there and what breaks them in here? Very different things. In here, Dean broke because he didn't know what would happen. A righteous man is allowed to sacrifice his soul, remember, and we cherished his innocence when we had him in the chains."

Michael tilts his head. "Innocence."

"Oh, I forgot. You never got to ride him, did you? You don't know what it's really like inside Dean Winchester." Michael's blank expression flickers for a moment and Sam braces himself, but the violence he expects doesn't come. The only reaction is a faint frown. "I watched the whole thing. Forty years of torture? You get to learn a lot."

Michael tenses. "I thought it was thirty."

"He was on the table for thirty, but if you think holding the knife was any less of a torture for your righteous man then you really don't know much about him. Of course, it hardly matters now."

"Perhaps not." 

"Perhaps?" Lucifer comes forward and leans his hip against the table by Sam's knees, arms folded over his chest. "Oh, you think—what, that they're going to open up the cage, get us out?

Michael firms his mouth. "The seals are already broken. Lilith is dead. It is possible."

"Right." Lucifer shakes his head. Sam can't quite see his face, but his voice is quiet. "And who, besides you, is so eager for me to die that they'll risk opening up the can again?"

"Raphael is loyal."

"To you? Or to our father? I remember being told to honor the humans above all others. Seems like lots of our siblings don't think the mud monkeys are worth the worship."

Michael looks away, doesn't answer. Sam expects Lucifer to go on the attack, but instead there's a long, heavy beat of silence before Lucifer straightens and goes back to the worktable. Sam's fingers clench reflexively and a fresh surge of blood covers the meat hook he's clinging to, but he knows better than to make any noise.

"Even if we do get out," Lucifer says, finally. "I'll have Sam, but Dean still won't say yes to you."

"The other son is available."

"Sure, Adam. We saw how well that worked out. Where are you hiding him, anyway?"

Michael looks up, with a brief smile. "He's safe. He will be an acceptable vessel when the time comes."

"Acceptable, but not good enough. You should've played Dean a little better, big brother."

"As well as you played Sam?"

A hand lands at the back of Sam's neck and he tries to go lax and loose as fast as he can. "I think we're doing all right, don't you, Sam?" He nods, and deft fingers smooth his hair away from his brow, tuck it behind his ear. "Regrettable that someone didn't manage to take his brother away. If he had, Sam would've never found the strength to toss us in here. But here we are."

Michael clenches his jaw. His shoulders come off the wall and he straightens, and for a few seconds Sam is sure he'll be abandoned to the fire. He doesn't know if that'll be a relief or not. Michael takes a deep breath, and Lucifer's fingers tighten in Sam's hair—but then Michael's face changes and it's as though the room gets a little darker.

After a long pause, his eyes flick down to Sam. "What did you mean," he says, and his voice is calm but his eyes are—"about this one being stronger?"

Lucifer's hand slowly slackens and drops away from Sam's scalp. "Sorry, didn't mean to make you jealous," he says. He doesn't sound nearly as full of mockery as Sam expected. "All the time you watched Dean, from the seventies to the minute you came to him, you didn't notice?"

Michael's still looking at Sam. Sam doesn't dare turn away, but somehow that blank, stern gaze is almost worse than Lucifer's amiable cruelty.

"We brought Dean downstairs and there was no one left to live for, no one to protect. Doesn't care about himself. So, sure, give him to Alistair, he'll break the first seal. Easy." Michael glances up at Lucifer and Sam's finally free to bury his face against his arm, let the tears flow heavy and hot. He can't listen to this. It's bringing up too many memories. He almost wants the knife back, just so he doesn't have to think. "You bring Dean topside again, you give him a little brother to take care of and an angel to walk at his right hand? That gives him fear. You tell him he's an archangel's vessel, all he hears is that he's going to help destroy the world. Really, Heaven should work on their study of the humanities. It's embarrassing."

"What you describe sounds like strength, to me. Not weakness."

Lucifer sighs. "Michael, really? Above, below. Angels, demons. You and me. You know nothing in creation exists in a dichotomy. Sam said yes because he thought he could do more, could help people. That kind of stupid, iron-clad virtue? A strength no rack in Hell can snap."

"Then what is the point of all—this?"

Michael sounds bewildered, at last. There's a pause, and then all of Sam's injuries are gone and he takes a deep breath, shifts his shoulders and feels not even a phantom echo of pain. He's still on his stomach, but his hands are free, and he buries his face in his folded arms, hides in the little shadow he can make for himself. This never lasts long, and he understands that the respite is just another form of torture, but—he'll take it.

"Sam doesn't have any innocence left." Lucifer's hand lights on the back of Sam's thigh and rests there, gentle and warm as a promise. Sam swallows, and doesn't move. "No need to scrape it out of him. But, oh, the things you can create down here, using their heads. The promises you can make. Michael, this isn't a rack. This is a forge."

 

 

It shouldn't be a surprise the first time the torture turns a different direction, but maybe Lucifer was wrong—maybe Sam did have some innocence left.

He wakes in a warm bed. The light here is clean, the sheets and walls grey with morning. A body is curled over his naked back and he shifts, turns his face into the pillow, feels the plush weight of breasts and a girl's fragile hand lax on his bicep. There's something—this isn't what he remembers, and dread is gathering in a tight knot under his lungs and his breath's going shallow—but when he turns over Jess is smiling at him, hair a wreck, eyes clear and focused and that familiar, faithful blue. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, to drag his gaze away and find, standing just past the bed, one man in dark clothes and one man in white, one watching carefully and the other just grinning. Jess's hand curls over the suddenly taut muscle of his shoulder and she pulls him down into a kiss made no less sweet by the mingling of their morning breath and Sam closes his eyes, he can't help it.

What hurts and what feels good should be easy to distinguish. They're not, anymore. He doesn't understand what Lucifer's doing. Jess rolls on top of him and he thinks, _I've been here before_. Junior year, when they finally moved into the house; both of them sore from hauling boxes of textbooks, ratty furniture they'd found at the Goodwill, duffle bags full of (mostly Jess's) clothes. He'd joked about the female propensity to shoe collection and she'd kicked him in the shin, no power behind it, and he'd obligingly hopped around, cursed, until he fell on his back on the bed. They didn't finish unpacking.

Jess is mouthing at his throat in just the way she knows sets him off and, somewhere, Sam hears, "See that? If I do say so myself, I am _good_ ," and then Jess is easing off his sweatpants and Sam arches into her, loses a little time, but then—

He opens his eyes and sees darkness and red light and dripping chains, and Lucifer is on his left side and Michael is on his right, and he's naked, and Jess is leaning forward, whispering, "Hey, Sam," and she's smiling. She presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth and her shoulder moves and Sam shakes his head, realizes. Her eyes aren't blue anymore. He's flat on his back on a metal table and Jess has three fingers in him pressing just right and a razor embedded between two ribs on his left side, and he jerks away from one hand while rocking down onto the other, tears sliding down his face but his mouth open, too, saying, _please_ , but he doesn't know what he's asking for.

 

Sam wakes in a cold bed. He's a little sore from yesterday's hunt—another vengeful spirit, a grave exhumed and bones burnt, two people dead but the last victim saved. It's weird that it felt easy, but then, as Dean said, _We've just got higher standards now, Sammy_. Dean's still sleeping, over in the other bed. Sam's mouth twitches into a smile at the open mouth, the obvious drool on the pillow.

Considering how crappy this motel is, the shower is weirdly perfect. Sam braces his hands against the tile and almost moans at the flawless pressure on his shoulders, the water just this side of too hot and easing all the muscles in his back until he just wants to go back to sleep right there in the tub. He resurfaces to a muffled thumping on the door, Dean's voice coming through scratchy with morning, saying, "Damn it, Sam, don't friggin' drown. I've got to take a leak, let me in." He rolls his eyes, but obligingly shuts off the water. He wraps a towel around his hips and unlocks the door and Dean darts in past him, coughing at the steam but already fumbling at the fly on his boxer-briefs. The moment Sam hears the stream hit the water Dean lets out a long, satisfied sigh. Sam grins and goes to find pants.

The day is uneventful. They take the Impala on a little tour of the town. Two cop cruisers are parked outside the graveyard, the officers looking bored while the groundskeeper gestures at the pile of upturned earth. Dean honks and gives the cops a thumbs-up and Sam punches his arm, but they're already speeding away. They find a diner. Red vinyl banquettes, middle-aged waitress. Sam's pancakes are a little spongy, but the coffee is fantastic. Dean inhales his omelette in record time and asks for extra bacon, but then kicks his feet up onto Sam's side of the booth and starts detailing the creative change between Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti while Sam finishes, lets him eat slow. In the booth on the other side sit two men, one blond and one dark, and when Dean gets up to pay Sam hears one say, "This is pointless," and other says, "Shh, just wait." Sam pauses, but Dean's jerking his head up at the register and he gets up, follows.

In the afternoon they visit the third almost-victim and he's shaky, but grateful, and when they leave his apartment Dean claps Sam's shoulder and Sam fights down a smile. They stop in at the Wal-Mart and stock up on the necessities: salt, shampoo, bullets. Dean tries to get Sam to try on a series of truly terrible hats and Sam steals the basket from him, goes to the pharmacy section for ibuprofen, vitamins he'll have to convince Dean to take, caffeine pills. While they stand in line at the front, Dean modeling five dollar sunglasses against the too-bright fluorescent lights, Sam squints at two men, sitting on the bench next to the greeter. It looks like they're watching him. "Hey," Dean says, smacking his arm, and Sam blinks. "Come on, let's grab some take-out."

At the motel, they've finished up the fried rice and Dean's halfway through a box of kung pao beef, watching something with Jet Li in it and really bad dubbing. Sam's at the little table, reading the news on his laptop. "Hey, you think we could learn some kung fu?" Dean says, mumbling with his mouth full, and Sam ignores him. They're each on their third beer and Dean's laughing softly at a particularly goofy fight scene when Sam glances out the window, sees two men. He frowns, but they're just leaned up against the rusty SUV parked next to the Impala, apparently watching the stars. For a second he tunes out the scratchy noise from the television and he thinks he hears _Just wait, this is the good part. He doesn't even realize yet_ , and then Dean's standing up, tossing his empty bottle into the little trashcan. He's grinning a little, suddenly predatory, and Sam pushes back from the table, spreads his hands as if to say _well?_ Dean's straddling him in the next second, hands on his jaw and mouth hot and tasting of brown sauce and beer, and Sam closes his eyes, settles his fingers just under Dean's thin t-shirt on the soft skin of his waist, opens up to it.

There's delighted laughter on the edge of his hearing but Dean's right here, warm and rocking against him just right, and Sam ignores the laughter in favor of Dean's heavy breath against his shoulder when he gets his mouth on the tendon just under his ear, bites just where he knows Dean likes. He gets his hands under Dean's ass and stands in one smooth motion and Dean chuckles, slings an arm around Sam's neck and wraps his legs around his waist. "Love it when you get all manly, little brother," Dean says, smirk right up against Sam's cheekbone, and Sam takes the few steps to the bed and twists so that when they fall back Dean's on his knees, ass tight against Sam's crotch. It's easy after that, familiar. By the time they're both naked Dean's on his back and Sam's got two fingers in him, twisting. Dean curses, one hand on the back of Sam's neck and the other wrapped around Sam's wrist, urging him faster, and he throws his head back with a _fuck, Sammy, goddamn it_ when Sam finally stops teasing and shoves in. They don't need it slow and gentle, not tonight. Dean spreads his legs wider, gets his hands on Sam's ass, eggs him on. Sam's got his fingers in Dean's hair, just long enough to grip, and what bubbles up in his chest is just—immense, relief and joy and things he doesn't have names for. Dean's breath hitches and he says, "Sammy," and Sam drops his hand between them and just like that Dean's arching up. His eyes are closed, his face twisted as though with pain, and Sam's breathing hard with an open mouth, cradling Dean's skull in his palms, and then it's like nothing to push a little harder, to move a little faster. He slides a thumb to the soft pink edge of Dean's lower lip and thinks, _I didn't know it could be this way_. Dean's eyes open, green and wet, and Sam leans in and kisses him, slots a hand under the small of his back to keep him in just the right place, and then— and then—

He opens his eyes and he's curled on his side on the table, gasping. In front of him, Lucifer grins and rocks back on his heels and Michael stands with arms folded. Sam's still halfway gone, half his mind cradling Dean and easing out, smoothing his hands over familiar skin, and so he can barely pay attention when Michael says, "A memory?" and Lucifer responds, "Nope, just a dream. Dean doesn't know. Hell, you barely know, right, Sam?"

Sam pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes. _Dean shifts over onto his back and makes a face at the stickiness between his thighs. He shoves at Sam until he goes up and gets a washcloth, muttering complaints but smiling, too, lax and languid on the bed. Sam can't stop looking at him._ Lucifer says, "Big brother's very demanding, it seems," and Michael looks over at him and doesn't say anything at all.

 

One night Sam drives the Impala up to the curb in front of the concert hall and hops out, tossing the keys to the valet. He lets out a shaky breath before he opens up the passenger door himself, but Lucifer takes his hand as he gets out of the car, doesn't mind that he's nervous. He doesn't let go, either, which leaves Sam to pull their tickets out of his jacket and pay for two glasses of wine one-handed in the empty lobby. Lucifer grins a little, cradles the little plastic cup against his chest. Sam takes a sip and it's a dark red explosion on his tongue, tannins flooding his mouth with saliva. Outside the huge glass windows, the night is black and empty of stars.

He leads Lucifer down the deserted banks of seats to the front row. There's one other man there, seated on one of the aisles in a dark suit, but Sam ignores him. They sit right in the center, and Lucifer stretches his arm over the back of Sam's chair like every cliché Sam's ever heard and they laugh about it, but Lucifer's thumb is warm at the base of Sam's neck, stroking up and settling in the little hollow at the top of his spine where the hair's the softest. The curtains are still closed, the hall's light spilling over them a bright bloody red. Sam turns to whisper something into Lucifer's ear—but then the lights go down, the curtains start to slide open, and Lucifer says, _shh_. Sam settles in for the show.

The stage is bare at first. White light, black floor. Faint music starts, and Sam thinks he can pick out a flute, maybe a violin—high, sustained notes that make him break out in a sweat under his jacket. It sounds a little like anxiety. Bobby and Ellen push something out on the stage, huge, right in the middle. Bobby cranks something and it tilts; a giant mirror, turns out, reflecting nothing but the black ceiling. The violin climbs higher and higher, sounding almost like sirens, like a shriek, until Sam has clamp his hands over his ears. Lucifer laughs beside him, soft, and then fingers are gently closing around his wrists, pulling his hands down. "You'll miss the show," Lucifer's whispering, and Sam shrugs a little, embarrassed. Lucifer chucks him under the chin and Sam just wants to lean in and touch him right there, but then a finger is on his jaw, pointing his face back toward the stage. Bobby and Ellen have gone and the music's slowed down, gotten deeper. Cello and clarinet and tympani, Sam thinks, and on the giant mirror is Jess, throwing her head back and gasping as Dean strokes a hand up the inside of her thigh.

They're arranged so Sam and Lucifer can see them in profile, and Dean sinks his fingers into Jess as the tympani get louder and their reflected selves arch with them, so it looks like four different people moving in sinuous unison. Such a clever composition, Sam thinks, and the side-lighting shifts from a plain white to amber, turning Jess's hair to honey-gold and gleaming over Dean's bare back when he finally stops teasing and slides into her. Sam leans forward a little, entranced. Lucifer's hand is warm on the back of his neck. Dean likes to do this right and Jess is already making those little noises Sam used to know. The cellist starts to play faster and Dean shifts back, hauls Jess up into his lap and fucks up into her in hard, controlled bursts, and the reflection of them spills down in the mirror, crazily slanted and suddenly lit red. Jess throws her head back and Dean bites at her collarbone, and as she starts to come Dean pulls a knife out of nowhere and slides it just where she needs it, up between her ribs where it'll hit her heart fastest. The music stops, and the only sound besides the flat wet noise of blood dripping down onto the mirror is Dean's panting. He drops Jess and she slides off of him, tumbling with her reflection down the mirror until she drops onto the stage with a fat thud. Dean stares at the blood slick for a moment and then lies back on the mirror, one knee bent up and an arm tucked indolently behind his head, and the doubling of him is elegant origami. He takes a long, deep breath and then, finally, turns his head and looks right at Sam with green empty eyes, and then the lights go out.

Sam and Lucifer clap, not just politely. From the corner of his eye, Sam can see the other man frowning, watching them, but Lucifer doesn't seem to mind. When the curtain has closed Lucifer says, "So, did you like it?"

He's got that little half-smile on, the one Sam misses when it's not there, and Sam leans in and murmurs it against the clever, soft corner of his mouth. "I liked it if you did," he says, and when Lucifer laughs it's all Sam can do not to kiss him. When the theater dissolves away Sam's sitting on the table, Lucifer in the space between his spread knees, and he slides an easy arm around Lucifer's waist, props his forehead on the arch of his clavicle, and though Michael's eyes are heavy on them he just sighs. Lucifer puts a hand on Sam's back, right on top of a whip-mark Sam had forgotten, and Sam flinches a little, but doesn't move away.

 

Lucifer has Sam spread out on rough wood, arms tight above his head and ankles secured so he's arrayed in a long, sweat-sheened x. Michael is in the corner, watching. Sam's thighs are already trembling, his breath coming fast and heavy, and Lucifer hasn't even started on him yet. A razor touches down in the divot at his hip and he closes his eyes, digs his shoulders into the cross so hard he gets splinters.

"You're so sweet," Lucifer says. He starts carving and Sam keens out something wordless, yanks uselessly at his bound wrists but knows they won't bleed because Lucifer's very good at this. 

"Is that—" Michael leans forward. "The sigil to cast out angels. Really."

"What?" Lucifer says. He pulls the blade over the skin with a flourish and Sam jerks, but doesn't shout. "You can't say I don't have a sense of humor."

Sam loses some time. When he resurfaces, the blood is flooding out sluggishly over his side, down his thigh. The carving covers his whole hip, around almost to his back, and each cut throbs with his heartbeat. Lucifer moves to stand between his legs, sliding dry hands up over Sam's heaving ribs. "Hey there, Sam," he says, and Sam opens his eyes to a little smile, to hard blue eyes. "How's it going?"

Sam pants, tastes iron.

Lucifer smiles a little wider, drags a thumb over the sigil and swipes the blood over Sam's cheekbone. "I know, I know. What do you want next?"

"Just—" The word is shredded, barely vocalized at all, but of course Lucifer hears it. He cocks his head and images flood through Sam's mind, but he can't pick anything out, doesn't really know how to choose. He closes his eyes and sees his cluttered bedroom from senior year, the strong span of Dean's back in the beds they'd share as kids, a dark motel room where his mouth tasted like blood. Lucifer's hands stroke over his chest and a kiss is pressed to his jaw, his eyebrow, the little spot under his ear. He melts back into the cross, all of his muscles going quiescent at once. Lucifer sinks a knife through his palm to pin his hand to the wood. He can't scream because Lucifer's mouth is on his. 

After a few moments, Lucifer pulls back. His lips are red from where Sam bit him, but he doesn't look angry. He doesn't look pleased, really, either, and Sam blinks through tears at the odd non-expression, the steady eyes and unsmiling mouth. Lucifer swipes a thumb over Sam's cheek and smears away the salt-wet blood, and then he waves a hand and the bindings on Sam's wrists disappear, the knife winks out of existence. Sam can't help it; he lunges forward and buries his face in Lucifer's throat, fisting his hands into the white shirt and not caring that it'll soon be red.

"Hey," Lucifer says, soft against the top of his head, and Sam shakes when a benign hand gentles down his spine.

"I'm sorry," Sam's whispering, whenever he can get a breath, and Lucifer pulls away a little, cups his face, says, "I know, Sam, I know you are," and they're in a white, clean bedroom, curtains of faint grey gauze shielding them from the light, and Lucifer's spreading Sam out between soft sheets, putting his hands and mouth wherever Sam needs them, pressing his lips to Sam's wet face and murmuring nothing Sam can understand. A careful touch is tracing the bloody symbols on his hip and Sam arches up into warmth, turning his face away automatically to give Lucifer better access to his throat, their fingers tangling when his hands are pushed into the mattress above his head. His breath hitches in his chest and the muscles in his thighs and stomach are spasming, and Lucifer breathes out warm against his temple, says, "Sammy, you're doing so good," and then everything collapses.

Sam comes to on his table, skin once again made whole and clean and new. He curls around Lucifer, burrows his head into the pillow of his accommodating shoulder. A gentle touch strokes over Sam's healed hand where it clutches at Lucifer's shirt and he closes his eyes, doesn't bother trying to settle his breathing.

"Amazing," Michael says, from somewhere off to the side.

"He is, isn't he," says Lucifer.

Michael says, "I wasn't talking about him." On Sam's skin, the trailing softness of Lucifer's touch stills.

 

 

Sam opens his eyes. His restraints are gone, but he still feels the rough weight of leather on his wrists, at his ankles. He's cold, and there's no light, and the jagged stone at his back scrapes over his newly healed skin when he tries to stand. He manages a half-crouch, one hand tight on the wall to stop himself from falling. He doesn't hurt. He doesn't know what to do.

Lucifer's gone. Sam swallows, closes his eyes so at least he won't have to see all that awful, gaping black, keeps himself shut into the familiar dark behind his eyelids. Lucifer's gone, and Michael with him, and Sam doesn't—there isn't anything left. He puts his hands over his face and it's wet, and he digs his fingers into his scalp and silk-soft strands of his own hair tangle around his knuckles, and there's no need to settle his breathing, no one to impress or to let down, and so he doesn't try.

Alone. An old, half-forgotten thought emerges: he used to crave brief moments of solitude. Used to reach for them, fruitlessly, like someone trying to satisfy a deep, constant itch, because as long as he could remember there was always someone within arm's reach, always someone there to comment if he tripped, to help him up after he fell. _Gotta get control of those long legs, Sammy_ , and he'd thrown off the helping hands as soon as he was upright, wished he could be anywhere else. Wished he could be normal so he'd have a bedroom he could lock himself up in, a door he could close, just to stretch out alone and have blessed silence so he could just think.

The solitude stretches around him now, a non-presence, an absence practically physical. The weight of all that empty space crushes him against the wall and he buries his face in his folded arms, curls up against the freezing stone, and thinks _this must have been what it was when he was here alone_. How long did Lucifer hang here, suspended in all that blank nothing?

Unbidden, Sam thinks _human existence stretches back so far, two hundred thousand years when that first ape stood on two legs and thought, and if it's two hundred thousand years on Earth how long was it here_ , and somewhere he hears Dean singing along to Jagger in that familiar off-key tenor _I've been around for a long, long year, stole many a man's soul and faith_.

 _I have faith_ , Sam thinks, words clear as a church-bell's peal, but when he opens his eyes there's still no light.

He loses time again. It's not as easy, like this. He can feel, but there's no sound beyond his own panting breath and there's nothing to see, and so it's almost as though his body is something he's imagining—he shivers and he doesn't know if he's really cold or if that, too, is a dream. He sleeps, sometimes, or thinks he does. He'll open his eyes after a period of blankness and wonder if he was actually resting or if his mind was simply giving up. Time passes with him thinking nothing at all, and once he realizes he thinks too much, drags at ideas until they spiral out of control, because just the thought that he might end up as hollowed-out bare as this place makes him want to scream, even if there is no one left to hear it.

He misses Lucifer. Misses Michael, too, even if he was only ever a dark blue gaze on the edge of Sam's vision, an occasional comment when Lucifer's hands were on his skin. He misses Dean. He casts his mind back even farther and misses his dad and Bobby and, distantly, Jess, but then time slip-slides against him and he can't quite remember how long it's been since he saw them all. It feels like a thousand years, maybe, but—surely, back on the surface, it's been only a few months.

"It was forty years," he hears, and slams his eyes closed because that's Dean's voice. Figures, when he's reaching out in the dark and he's all alone it's Dean who comes to mind. Forty years in four months, and even here he can do the math. So if it's a thousand years it should be—but it doesn't feel right, and though his body can't change and his hair and nails and skin and teeth will remain in stasis in the cage's exquisite stillness, he knows that it hasn't been so long. There's what he knows, and what he feels, and he digs his blunt nails into the tender skin of his palms and tries not to do either.

Without any distractions his mind is free to wander. He wonders whether Dean kept his promise, to go to that woman and have a life. He doubts it, honestly, but maybe—maybe without Sam around as a distraction Dean managed it. He's sure Lucifer ( _no, don't think about him_ ) would have told him if Dean had—died, one way or another. After all, Lucifer seems oddly well-informed for someone so thoroughly trapped, and Sam's sure he's got some way to see what's going on, to help him make plans with his most loyal demons, to guide Lilith and Azazel and Ruby to their brief victory, to watch Sam.

The thought of Lucifer's attention makes him fill with a heady wanting, pure and strong as a hot, thick honey seeping through his bones, filling the hollow spaces and making him ache. He rolls to his hands and knees, hip pressed solidly to the cold stone, lets his head hang down between his shoulders, and thinks frantically of anything, anything else.

_Dean shrugs his shoulders restlessly under the weight of Dad's old jacket, but he's giving the bored girl at the counter one of his brighter, dirtier smiles. Sam stands back a little, fighting the urge to roll his eyes._

_"King?" the girl says, and when she opens her mouth Sam can see the pastel green of her minty gum, tucked unsubtly into her back molars._

_Dean's smile fades a little. "Uh, no," he says, and there's more than a little irritation in it. "Two queens."_

_Sam is seventeen, at the first horrible aching edge of a second growth spurt, but still an inch or two shorter than Dean, and it's been made very clear to him that his messy hair and his shy gangliness and his smooth skin make him look like a girl. Dean is almost twenty-two and he's six feet of confidence, freckles fading into his tan and shoulders broad. Doesn't stop the girl from looking between the two of them, at the way Sam wraps tight fingers around the strap of his backpack and the way Dean's mouth curls, and saying, "Sure, okay," and handing Dean a key._

_Dad's gone, off to meet with some contact, but Sam didn't pay much attention to who or where or why. He follows Dean's muttered grumbling down the  cracked sidewalk to one of the unremarkable doors and, when it opens, flings his backpack and his body down onto a scratchy polyester bedspread, pushing his cheek into the cool fabric. Dean puts his bag on the bed next to the door, of course, and slings his jacket off onto the little table._

_"Christ," he says, and Sam can tell the scowl is genuine. "Can't believe she thought—" but he glances at Sam, and doesn't finish it._

_The evening passes much as it usually does when Dad's gone. Dean orders a pizza and thumbs through the options on the motel's crappy cable package. Sam reads one of his stolen textbooks. He's halfway through the chapter on the shift in the American consciousness between the passage of the eighteenth and twenty-first amendments when the pizza arrives, with an unexpected six-pack, and he doesn't ask—Dean slides a beer across the table at him with a casual, "Don't tell Dad." He doesn't like the taste that much, but nurses it in sips as he goes through the review section at the back of the chapter. Dean sharpens the knife he keeps in his boot and watches Die Hard 3, and then the last three innings of a Cubs game, and when Sam is nodding at the desk he says, "Jeez, Sammy, history's not going anywhere." It's enough impetus for Sam to brush his teeth, shuck his jeans and crawl into bed, and Dean turns off the lamp but the TV stays on. Dean takes a shower, the door open between the rooms as is their habit, and steam curls out with the dim yellow light. On the television, the program fades into the enthusiastic voices of an infomercial. Sam shifts under the covers until he faces the closed blinds, by Dean's bed, and though he's exhausted he can't quite sleep._

_The shower shuts off. Sam listens to the familiar ritual of Dean readying for bed—the low scrape of shaving over barely running water, the rustle and snap of a wet towel. He shuts his eyes when the light goes off and listens to Dean pad over the thin carpet, flop onto the other bed with the muffled complaint of an old box spring. They breathe for a while together, and Sam is almost asleep when Dean fumbles for the remote again. There's a few clicks and the volume on the infomercials goes way, way down, but not so far down that Sam can't tell when Dean changes the channel to porn. Another beer pops open and Dean settles into the other bed, with a sigh, and there's faint high-pitched moaning at the very edge of Sam's hearing, but when he slits his eyes open he looks right at Dean. The light from the TV plays over his face in cold, fluorescent blue, flickering with brief colors—dark green, faint yellow, unexpected red. It's enough light that Sam can see the moment when his mouth opens, just faintly, and Sam holds himself perfectly still when Dean's free hand slides beneath the blankets. He doesn't—do anything, not that Sam can see, and instead Sam watches as he takes another long swallow of beer. His mouth is washed out to the lightest pink, but Sam can still see the wet gleaming on the curve of his top lip when he pulls the bottle away, and he slams his eyes closed, doesn't dare move. If Dean starts breathing a little heavier, Sam can't see why, and he listens to the faint creak when Dean shifts on the mattress and doesn't think a thing._

"Sam?"

It takes a minute to distinguish, but Sam knows that that isn't from the memory. He opens his eyes.

The light is bright after so long, and he flinches away from the wash of red and black and sick green. The stone scrapes his back when he shifts and he wraps his hand around the nearest chain, ignores the wet metallic slide of it, because on a metal table before him is Dean—naked, strapped down with leather and iron, his wrists pinned above his head but his mouth unrestrained. His eyes are huge, rimmed with wet, and it's so dark here that Sam can't see any green. For a moment as Dean gasps at him he thinks they're black, from edge to edge, but before he can take a step forward there's a hand on his elbow and he sags in relief.

"Howdy, Sam," says Lucifer, and he's unchanged, his shirt crisp and white and his eyes that familiar pale blue. Sam goes pliant, ready for whatever Lucifer wants. He knows he's staring, but he can't care. Lucifer keeps his eyes on Sam for a long, long time, and the attention is like a drink of water after a nightmare-riddled night, like soaking up the hot air from the Impala's vents after a cold hunt. Lucifer puts a palm on his cheek and Sam leans into it. His lips part around a sigh and Lucifer's blank expression flickers, just for a moment. A pulse of white light behind him haloes his hair to silver and Sam just wants to lean forward, wants to slide into him and never let go, but Lucifer glances away.

Michael is standing next to Dean. He's still dark on dark, his mouth an unsympathetic line, but Sam can see where the seams are splitting, light trying to spill through. "Distracted?" he says to Lucifer, and Sam shudders when Lucifer's hand burns cold against his cheek.

"Just setting up for round two," Lucifer says, and when he turns back to Sam his eyes are distant, hard, and Sam shivers.

"Where did you go?" Sam says. He raises careful fingers to Lucifer's wrist, but there's no reaction. "You left me alone."

"You won't be alone now, Sammy," Lucifer says, and he nods at Dean—Dean, who's still staring right at Sam, his mouth bitten to a painful red. While Sam watches, confused, a familiar heat starts to lick at his skin, but it's on Dean that the flames burst up. They crawl up his calves, spread over his hips, climb inexorable up the vulnerable arch of his throat, and his screams are like every nightmare Sam's ever had. Lucifer's hand has slipped to the back of Sam's skull, fingertips digging into his scalp, and the smell of scorching meat is starting to make Sam gag.

"Nothing worse than watching your brother burn, is there, Sam?" Lucifer says, and Sam turns to him to find him looking right at Michael. There's no reaction from the other archangel and Lucifer's jaw clenches.

"I don't understand," Sam says. Lucifer doesn't look at him and Sam can't reach out, doesn't dare to. "Why are you doing this to me?"

Dean's screaming has stopped and Sam looks to see him charred, twisted and black. The skin is healing, though, even as he watches, and the flames are still going. Sam knows how that feels and he wants to smother the flames with his own body, take the fire into his flesh, but Lucifer's nails bite at his scalp and he subsides.

Michael flicks a glance from Dean's slow rebuilding to where Sam is anchored by Lucifer, and the disgust in his face is a palpable force. "This is your cage, Lucifer," he says, and Sam blinks. "Yours alone."

"Not alone," Lucifer says, and when he lets go of Sam's skull Sam drops to his knees, all his strength gone. Lucifer's grin is wide and ugly and his rage is rolling off of him in waves that make Sam's skin prickle with need. "What, you think you'll get out of here unscathed?"

Michael flicks a look between Lucifer and Sam. "You can't touch me."

He's gone, then, in a blast of light. Lucifer stands still for a moment. Sam reaches out, careful, but Lucifer snaps his hand out of reach before Sam can touch it.

"Look," he says, the order slamming into Sam's bones, and he turns to see a tall man leaning over Dean, razors in his hands and a smile on his face. Dean's bleeding, a leather gag between his teeth, and Sam sucks in a breath but it's not as painful as the way Lucifer is somehow miles away from him, hatred glittering in his every line. "This is what there is. This is what's left."

Sam shakes his head, but when he looks back Lucifer's gone. Around him the room is red and bloody and the wall at his back is still cold and black, and in front of him Dean bleeds, and screams around his gag, and when the flames come back it's almost a relief, because at least then he doesn't have to think.

Dean is cut apart and bled dry and drowned and frozen and starved and waterboarded and raped and held down and kissed and dissected and pumped full of holy water, of dead man's blood, and demons appear to taunt him and ghouls and vampires and werewolves tear at his flesh, drink from his exposed throat, snatch his heart from out of his snapped-apart ribs. Sam burns. Sometimes Dean burns, too, and Sam feels an inexplicable relief, that at least they're in it together. Sometimes it's not Dean on the table but someone else, a man or a woman or a child, and it's Dean holding the knife, with a scalpel in his capable fingers, and even if tears are sliding down his face he knows exactly what to do with a blade and as yet unscathed skin. Sometimes Dean looks up, right at Sam, and Sam wonders—is this a memory, or a dream, or a bloody documentary, a record of forty years when Sam couldn't save him?

Another thousand years pass in this manner and Sam knows his sanity is far outside his own grasp. His flesh scorches away and he sees Dean's grin bisected with bloody red, and he thinks of his mind like one of the old vases he used to love, shattered so many times but reconstructed, the lines between the broken pieces filled in with gold. If he looks up to where the ceiling should be there is an occasional corona of white light and he thinks _maybe he'll come back, maybe he'll come back and save us_ , but it doesn't happen.

Slowly, he remembers. He's meant to hate this, he thinks, and across from him Dean is carefully splitting the backbone of a screaming man, exposing the spinal cord. "Dean," he coughs out, but there's no response. "Dean," he tries again, and now Dean is laid out and straining against a barbed lash. "Dean," Sam yells, and Dean's screaming, eyes wet and mouth bloody and fire just starting to lick against his sides, and something in Sam cracks, again, but then Sam's blinded, eyes full of light, and in another world his eyes would have burnt out of his skull but instead he's here, and here he sees—

 

Sam opens his eyes. Before him stand two men. On the left stands Michael, tall and dark and no longer impassive. On the right is Lucifer, and Sam's stomach flips at his fair hair, at his bright wet eyes. Dean's nowhere to be seen and there's no heat, no light, nothing but blank space which is filled edge to edge by two brothers and Sam presses back but there's no wall to catch him.

"How can I ever—" Michael says, and his hands are tight fists at his sides. "You walked away, Lucifer. It was you. I couldn't—I didn't have a choice."

"You did." Lucifer doesn't take a step forward, but his whole body strains toward Michael and Sam knows that feeling, the way your soul feels like cold iron aligned toward a distant, unfeeling north. "You always had a choice, Michael, it's just that you never made one."

Michael stares.

_Standing outside a bus depot in Ogden, Utah, and keeping one hand on his backpack and another on his duffel bag so he wouldn't reach out for Dean, wouldn't have to feel him pull away from one last hug. Dean standing two feet away but feeling like there's a canyon between them, and he's saying something about making sure Sam takes a good knife, knows where the best local gun store is, but there's nothing in his voice but flat ashen disappointment, and Sam wanting to drop everything, wanting to drag him in close and bury his face in the strong arch of his shoulder, but not able to. Stepping up onto the bus and sitting on the opposite side so he wouldn't have to look at Dean as it drove away and knowing the unforgiving pull of inertia, a choice made that you can't pull yourself out from under and so you just close your eyes and let it drag you a thousand miles away from everything you know, everything that's ever been home, because what else is there, what else can you do?_

Lucifer's breathing hard and shaky. "No one followed the order. You know that. Everyone pretended and acted like it was okay, but He was _gone_ , and we all knew it, and it was only when I—" He cuts himself off when a venomous bite creeps into the words. There's a pause, and a soft laugh. "Hell, from what I hear only one of our little brothers managed to obey and it was for just one of the stupid apes, that idiot vessel of yours. And you say I'm the traitor?"

"You are," Michael says, but there's no conviction behind it.

Lucifer takes a step forward. "Eons here," he says, and Michael closes his eyes. "Cut off. It's like—nothing you can imagine. You've never been alone, Michael, you don't know."

"You think so?" Michael says, and for a moment Sam thinks something cataclysmic is going to happen and he braces himself for impact. Lucifer sways toward his brother and Michael's face twists, as though with pain, and Sam blinks and sees those impossible fractals again. Somewhere, he knows that angels don't have bodies or even physical forms, not really, and so what Lucifer and Michael are is beyond his comprehension. Celestial mathematics spin unattainable shapes and Sam knows that they're locked into a synchronous orbit, their faces always aligned toward each other. What he can see, though, is the way Lucifer reaches out a pale, work-roughened hand, and the way Michael doesn't even have to open his eyes but still flinches back so Lucifer can't touch him.

Lucifer is silent, and then his hand drops. "Sam," he says, and a room shivers into existence around them. Sam gasps at the solid ground beneath his feet, at the wall at his back. "You love your brother, don't you."

Michael's eyes open, and they're dark, nearly black. "Yes," says Sam, as though there were any question.

"You'd do anything to stop him from burning."

Sam swallows, doesn't have to close his eyes to see what's behind them. "Yes."

Dean appears next to Michael, stripped naked and his hands full of blood. Michael doesn't look at him, but he does look at Sam, and Sam doesn't understand the way his expression shifts, the way he almost looks like he's pleading.

"Come here," says Lucifer, and Sam steps into the curve of Lucifer's arm, lets himself be gathered in close. Dean's eyes are empty but Michael is staring at them, and when Lucifer's hand strokes down his spine Sam shudders, but arches into it, too.

Lucifer's mouth is at his ear. Sam waits for fire or knives or a hand between his legs, but Lucifer just puts his other hand at Sam's jaw, keeps his face pointed right at Michael.

"If you could save the world by killing Dean, would you? Would you choose six billion humans over him?"

There's probably a right answer to that question. It doesn't occur to Sam to reach for it. In front of him, Dean's mouth is slack and pink, not yet bitten to red, and Sam thinks of the way Dean would shake him out of a nightmare when he was six, how he'd steadied Sam's gun hand when he was twelve, how when Sam was twenty-three he'd knelt in cold mud with Sam's heart's blood on his palms and told him it'd be okay, how every time he's seen Dean die it's felt like the whole world was crashing out of orbit, spinning off its axis and getting him a little closer to the heat-death of the universe.

"No," Sam whispers, and he's looking at Dean's empty expression but it's Michael who sucks in a breath.

"No," Lucifer echoes, and he shoves Sam onto his face on the ground. "No, of course you wouldn't."

 

 

It starts again, then. This time, Sam can recognize the pattern. Lucifer doesn't bother with torturing Dean because he's already made that point. He splits Sam open and touches his cheek after. He whittles away at Sam's understanding and gives him Bobby's gruff embrace, Jess making his favorite peanut butter cookies, and then Bobby and Jess will each take one side and carve him down to bone. Sam will wake to Dean tucked into the broad expanse of his chest, both of them grinning and sore, but just as Sam starts to get used to the pink arch of his mouth Lucifer will take it away and he'll have no choice but to curl back into Lucifer's arms, to accept what he can get.

Through it all, Michael watches, and when Sam can spare him any attention he looks like he's in pain.

When, at last, Lucifer pulls away from Sam's grasping hands, face blank and implacable, Michael's standing right next to him, waiting. Sam's breathing hard, blinking away tears, but he can still see when Michael puts a hand on Lucifer's shoulder. Lucifer doesn't flinch, but his eyes do close.

Sam's bleeding out, and he's not quite sure, but he thinks he hears _I—I can't_ and that doesn't make sense, but as his vision greys he sees Lucifer tangle his hand with Michael's, and his lips form the words _I know_ , _I know you can't_ , and they disappear and all Sam can see is black.

 

 

In the blinding emptiness that follows, Sam feels himself gathered up. He blinks and a gaunt man is looking down at him, his grip on Sam unsympathetic, firm, but not painful. "Brothers," the man says, with a put-upon sigh. "I really don't know why I bother."

 

 

Sam opens his eyes. He's on his back on a firm cot and he blinks, can't place it for a moment. The light is dim and grey, the air cool. A fan spins above him, the blades carving through a devil's trap, and salt sparkles in iron all around him on bare walls and he thinks, _panic room_ , and then he realizes.

He doesn't remember running up the stairs, doesn't remember the hall. Bobby's kitchen is the same book-scattered, cluttered mess it's always been and he hears two deep voices around the corner, the sound of them pulling at the space under his breastbone, squeezing at his lungs. He turns into the doorway and Bobby's sitting there, baseball cap on, saying something about a case, but all Sam can see is—

"Dean," he says, with half a breath, and his brother whips around in his chair and his expression is something Sam had never wanted to put there again, but damn if he isn't glad to see it. He takes a few steps forward, hardly daring to hope, and Dean's startled eyes fade into something a little harder, a little sharper.

"Sam?" he says, and he stands and he looks—Sam hits him hard in the chest, wraps his arms around him as tight as he can, because the last time he saw him Dean was bloody, face an empty mess, and he has to prove to himself that he's okay, that he's right here, that everything's all right. Dean's hands settle on him slowly and Sam thinks, faintly, _I'm probably crushing him_ , but he doesn't care. His spine arches to accommodate Dean's height and he buries his face in Dean's shoulder, feels ten years old again, and with Dean's touch seeping warm into his back it's very, very hard to pull away, to greet Bobby as he should.

The afternoon passes in half-finished conversations. Sam feels starved, like he hasn't eaten in a year or two, like he hasn't had a beer for longer than that. The sun is filtering through the dirty windows in Bobby's kitchen and he wants to curl into the squared-off light like a cat. He's wide-awake, like he's slept for years, and through it all he keeps reveling in the slick of cold condensation on the brown glass bottle, the slide of flannel over his skin. The way the chair feels at his back, slightly crooked and not quite comfortable, but real in a way he never thought he'd miss until he was certain he wasn't coming back.

Dean's eyes never quite leave him, and even when he's focused on the ridiculous peanut butter sandwich, even when he's trying to focus on Bobby's explanation of the hunt, he's aware of it. And, later, when he slides into the Impala, tan and black leather more of a home than he's ever known, Dean keeps his eyes on the road but Sam knows that he's not really seeing it. He puts his back into the corner of the seat and doesn't even pretend to watch the road, doesn't look at a map. There's time to think about the case later, when they're in the right state. For now, the steady thump of the blues is filling the car from one of Dean's older cassettes, and Dean's telling him some fragmented story of what happened while he was gone, and he doesn't even care that he can't remember a thing. There's a light rain falling, and the highway lights are spilling amber into the car's interior, spreading like wet honey over Dean's skin, and Dean glances over at him and Sam can't look away from the soft pink curve of his mouth.

 _I'd do anything_ , he thinks, and Dean says, "Sammy? You with me?"

"Yeah," Sam says, and his thoughts are full of light. "Yeah, 'course I am. Always."

Dean looks at him for another long second, but then turns his eyes back to the road. "Okay then," he says, and if it's a little rougher than Sam remembers he isn't going to comment. "Let's get onto the case."

"Right," Sam says, and turns to look out at the long highway and the cold, star-filled night.


End file.
